The Importance of Password Security

The Importance of Password Security

Is it Really Important

It is pretty fair to say that in our modern culture, technology is improving rapidly day by day. Computers are becoming more powerful, computer games are getting more advanced and internet threats i.e. hackers, are getting more bold and understanding of how to best to get to peoples information. In the last couple of years alone, people have has personal information taken from banks like Natwest and large tech companies like Sony. A lot of you may be aware that only a few years ago, Sony’s Playstation subscription was hacked with millions of users personal details stolen and all down to breaking through Sony’s password. So, is it really important, well, definitely yes. From simply keeping the kids from getting onto the c
omputer to keeping millions of customers personal details safe, passwords (and regularly changing them) allows a solid form of defence against would be hackers and stopping criminal activity such as identity theft, online piracy and information theft.

How Can I Best Protect Myself?

there are multiple ways of helping yourself, weather safeguarding at home information (such as Amazon login details) or safeguarding the office. Protecting your information at home;

A solid password containing capitals, numbers, special characters in random order will help create a solid password (check out our password generator here)

Regularly change it, this will always make it harder to access your information as it will always be different (weekly would be great but monthly will still really help)

Don’t use the same password for everything. This makes it easy for a hacker to access everything once you have used the same password for, definitely a big no no

These steps will go a long way to helping you keep things very safe.

As a business owner, there are a
few extra ways you can keep things safer with password control;

Again, a solid password containing capitals, numbers and special characters. Depending on how important or crucial the information you want protected should dictate how often you change it. Low level/risk information could be monthly to bi monthly. High level/crucial information could be weekly to daily (again depending on importance), always remember, the more regularly you change the password the safer it will be.

Again, as simple as it sounds, do NOT use the same password for multiple user details, how would your business be able to cope if half of your critical and personal files were taken or destroyed.

Password databases would be very handy to use. These databases allow you to store all your passwords under a master password. The reason for why this is handy is that if you are a business who uses a lot of software with password encryption, often complacency can slip in and it can be easy to use basic passwords or use the same password over and over in order to keep things simple (it can be a bit tricky to remember 20-30 passwords that are 15+ characters long and being random). Password databases will keep all your passwords safe, allowing you to only have to remember one password and have access to multiple passwords, it really is a nice simple way of keeping on top of everything.

Do not use passwords with links to personal details. As obvious as it sounds, there are many people who do this as its easy for you to remember the password but this also makes it easy for would be hackers to take personal details from you

Do not use words found in the dictionary. There are systems out there that will use this as a basis for trying to crack your password and will make it easier for them

Lastly, do not use adjacent keyboard combinations i.e. qwerty, again these are combinations that will be easily checked and cracked by hackers

All these steps do seem quite obvious, but, the obvious is often the most ignored and yet the most important. However, following these simple steps will help to keep your data as safe as you can (from your end) and keep you in the know of how up to date your password systems are!